The Kong Year in Review 2022

2022 is coming to a close, and what better way to end the year than a list for list's sake?

As we reflect on the year passing, here are the top five Kong moments of 2022 as decided by me (because all the people more important than me are already on vacation). Read on!

1. You hit +11 trillion requests a month

If you're feeling ready for some R&R, it's because you guys were busy in 2022. Really busy.

Kong's customers and community sent out a mind-melting +11 trillion API calls per month — that's courtesy of more than 30,000 organizations sending out around 375 billion a day. That's a lot.

2. Kong turned 5 years old

In 2022, Kong turned 5. But we're told we don't look at day over 4.

Kong started in 2017, which you may have figured out because of math. But what you might not know is that Kong's origin story goes all the way back to 2009 with the founding of Mashape . . . which eventually led to the creation of our blazing fast API gateway tech . . . which ultimately led to Kong. (Mashape. Kong. Get it?)

As we celebrated our fifth year, we expanded the Kong team around the globe (including opening a new office in London), grew our number of customers to over 570, announced Kong Certifications, and continued to roll out updates to our products.

• Kong Konnect — We made Kong Konnect available in the AWS Marketplace, expanded geographical availability, and added the ability for users to unlock runtime groups, user access management across teams and roles, dynamic client registration, federated authentication with OpenID Connect, and more.

• Kong Gateway — Kong Gateway 3.0 was announced (and we're now up to 3.1). In 2022, we added the ability for users to tap into Secrets Management, an FIPS 140-2 compliant core, dynamic plugin ordering, keyring and data encryption, consumer groups, and several new enterprise plugins.

• Kong Mesh — Kong Mesh and Kuma got a 2.0 release. Enhancements in 2022 have included the addition of eBPF support, RBAC audit, next-gen policies, Zone Egress, UI and performance improvements, and more.

• Kong Insomnia— Kong Insomnia added support for WebSockets and OpenAPI 3.1, plus custom linting rules, improved gRPC functionality with server reflection support, and a boatload of other improvements for an even smoother user experience.

Not bad for a five-year-old! (My five-year-old just asks our smart speaker to play that "Raining Tacos" song on repeat.)

3. The Community took it to the next level

Community is our not-so secret sauce at Kong. It's baked into our DNA, and we're dedicated to fostering a thriving community for Kong users around the world.

• In 2022, we're up to more than 190,000 Kong Community members and have more than 62,000 GitHub stars.

• A special shout out to our Kong Contributor of the Year Tharun Rajendran, a regular Kuma contributor who works for HousingAnywhere in the Netherlands.

• A big Kong-grats to our Kong Champion of the Year Sven Bernhardt, who has played a crucial role in growing our community and spreading awareness for our products.

Finally, a tip of the hat to the thousands of innovators out there in the 80 Kong meetup groups across 46 countries. Join your local Meetup group today . . . or after the holidays. But first thing next year!

4. Events were back in a big way

Love ‘em or hate ‘em (but also secretly love ‘em because how else are you going to get a bunch of free socks?) in-person events were back in a big way in 2022.

We got a kick out of catching up with the Kong Community everywhere from KubeCon to re:Invent. But, since we can't help but be a bit biased, Kong Summit 2022 was our highlight.

Kong's annual conference covering all things API and microservices was back in-person after two years of digital events. The summit brought together the broader Kong community, from customers and partners to open source users and industry thought leaders.

We also honored the winners of our second annual API Innovator Awards and our inaugural Kong Partner Awards.

Want to relive the good times via the magic of the blog? Check out our Kong Summit recap.

5. We got some good news

Good news, everyone! Thanks to the customers and community who power everything we do at Kong, we achieved some awesome awards and recognition in 2022.

• They say it's not news if it happens all the time, but we were thrilled all the same to share that for the third year in a row Kong was named a leader positioned furthest on the vision axis in the 2022 Gartner Magic Quadrant™ for Full Life Cycle API Management report.

• Thanks to Kong users offering their feedback, Kong earned top rankings on G2, landing in the leader quadrant in the API Management Tools and was named among the Easiest to Use API Management Tools with Highest User Adoption in the Winter 2022 G2 reports.

• Rounding out the mix, we landed on the Deloitte Technology Fast 500™ and The Forbes Cloud 100 and also CRN's 10 Coolest Cloud Computing Startup Companies of 2022.

Thanks again to our users, customers, and community for an awesome 2022.

Want to stay in the loop on what's next around all things Kong and API innovation? You can follow Kong on Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube — or keep scrolling to sign up for our newsletter!